Internet porn scandal, 1994

The turn of the New Year brings a new post in this sad little archive. Here's a CNN clip I've been sitting on from around July 13, 1994. Back then, Headline News really was a news channel with talking heads, not the "HLN" network of today whose programming consists mainly of celebrity gossip and lowest-common-denominator editorial panels desperately trying to compete with FOX News. Yet as you will see, this doesn't mean its mid-'90s reporting wasn't rife with sensationalism and general cluelessness.



A downloadable, higher quality transfer is also available.

The funniest part is just the idea that this was newsworthy at all. Someone uploaded some soft porn and pirated software from USEnet newsgroups onto an FTP site in a government-funded lab, and somehow this was a major scandal. This was before there were very many private websites, Gopher servers, or file servers whatsoever. There were roughly only 20 million people on the entire Internet! Man, those were the days.

In the Aug. 4, 1994 issue of Toronto's Eye Weekly, K.K. Campbell lampooned CNN's sensationalism:

Couple of weeks ago, California nuclear research facility Lawrence Livermore Labs discovered one computer held some dirty pictures. An employee gave away a password. Someone used that access to store the images. People could connect and get them. Nothing was hacked. Big deal. But on July 13, CNN reporter Don Knapp swooped in to whip up hysteria. Doom was clearly imminent. 'Computer security specialists were surprised to find what may be the largest computer collection ever of hardcore pornography at the nation's top nuclear weapons and research laboratory,' Knapp intoned ominously. Almost 2000 megs! Gol-ly! (Incidentally, 99 per cent of it was individual shots of nude/semi-nude women, no sexually explicit acts. Playboy stuff.) CNN rang Wired magazine writer Brian Behlendorf and woke him at home, excited about 'a big break-in at Laurence Livermore.' Hackers and porno! If CNN was lucky, the hacker was a child molester. Behlendorf consented to an interview. CNN immediately asked him to 'find some pictures of naked women on the Net for us.' Behlendorf recounted the incident: 'I really wasn't interested in doing that. I don't know of any FSP/FTP sites offhand anyways, and really didn't want to be associated with pictures of NEKKID GRRLS.' But amiable Behlendorf slid over to alt.binaries.pictures.supermodels and grabbed a picture of a model in a swimsuit. He also picked up a landscape, a race car and a Beatles album cover "to show that other images get sent over Usenet as well," naively thinking this point would be made -- though he stresses he by no means condones distributing copyrighted images, "clean" or otherwise. Behlendorf was then made to sit beside a terminal displaying Ms String-Bikini throughout all his comments. 'They made me keep returning to that damn bikini image ... over and over.' But intrepid reporter Don Knapp assured us all is well -- for now. 'Spokespeople for the national laboratories insist that at no time were the pornographers, nor the software pirates, able to cross over from the research network into the classified network. The labs say that, while they are embarrassed, national security was not breached.'